Happy Friday everyone, I hope you’re all having a good week and have a delightful weekend planned. Allow me to usher you towards it with a post about a 1960s-set cozy crime series!

It’s the 1960s and Eleanor Trewynn is a retired widow who is living over the charity shop she’s running in a Cornish village. Her niece Megan is a police detective who has recently transferred to the local force and now finds herself with a commanding officer who doesn’t really think female officers are a good idea. There’s an artist living next door and a cast of side characters who work in the charity shop. Eleanor and her husband lived all over the world working for a charity and this life experience means that she can handle almost anything and is used to trying to solve problems. And thus you have all the ingredients for a satisfying mystery.
As I’ve mentioned before, I really like Carola Dunn’s other mystery series – the 1920s-set Daisy Dalymple series. I don’t love these quite as much, but they have good puzzles to solve and an interesting premise and it’s nice to read a series set in the 1960s – there are lots of interwar historicals, and some immediately post war and 1950s ones, but not as many sixties ones. Yes Inspector Alleyn gets into the 1960s, but none of them are my favourites, his age is getting a bit fuzzy and Ngaio herself was in her 60s when she was writing them. There are only four of these which is a shame but I’ll take what I can get in these cases.
My copies all came from various bookshops – I read most of them when they first came out a decade ago, but the last one came out a year or two later (as you can tell by the non matching cover…) and I hadn’t seen it in the flesh (or at least I don’t remember seeing it) until I spotted it in Gower Street Waterstones the other week when I was on that little buying spree. What a fortunate circumstance. They’re also on Kindle and Kobo.
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